A really fun mockumentary about why Asian girls are always dating non-Asian men by the team at Wong Fu Productions:

I figured out the reason for the stuttering video - one of my render nodes in the farm had Blender 2.43, while the others had 2.42. Something changed between the two versions that caused the camera to be at a slightly different place. So, don’t mix Blender versions!

The render took about 6 hours this time, thanks to the laptop participating in most of it and the fact that I gave the Windows computer even more frames to render. It still finished about 30 minutes before the *nix boxen, so I really need to get it integrated into drqueue. I worked on that a little yesterday, but it turns out I’m going to have to do some upgrades for that to happen and I’ll just wait until I’m 100% done with “Jose’s Dinner”, since I already know this setup pretty much works. The animation finally looks pretty good so I think I’m done tweaking it. I might do another render next week because for some reason a bit of a twitch was introduced into the animation which wasn’t there last time. Depending upon when I get someone to do the music, this could be done by the end of June or earlier.

Ok, I’m about to start what I hope is this time the final render of “Jose’s Dinner”. After this it’s off to post-production.

If you want to see a REALLY, REALLY good animation, check out Three Legged Legs’ Samurai. It’s about 2-3 minutes long and it’s a wonderful little cartoon set in a stylized ancient japan.

A pretty interesting animation was done on Blender by an Arabic team. You can watch it here.

(all of these are pictures of Relient K, even in the sections when I’m talking about other bands)

My wife and I went to the Relient K concert yesterday in Baltimore. We were the oldest people there as I’ve been following them since their first album (which came out around 8-10 years ago), while many of these kids just started listening to them ever since they started getting airplay on Mtv. The opening act, Sherwood, was actually really good. I like them a lot. Their style sounds pretty similar to Relient K. Pretty happy music overall. Some girls in front of us knew every word and were bootlegging the performance on tiny video cameras. I’d buy their CD if I had some extra cash. The second group, Mae, was not so good. At least, I didn’t like them. Unlike the other two groups, they didn’t have the same type of sound and their singer, in my wife’s opinion, couldn’t sing. We took their set as an opportunity to go outside and get some fresh air. It was funny to see all the parents there.

I reviewed last night’s render today and I found a few little gaffes here and there. I made a list and fixed them up. I’m pretty confident that the next time I will be rendering the definitive version of the film. I’m pretty psyched. All that’s left now is to start up on the credits and add in the soundtrack. I’m hoping to be able to tap into some musical talent to do the soundtrack, but I haven’t found anyone yet. If you want to volunteer your skills, leave a comment.

Well, the rendering is now done for “Jose’s Dinner”! Quite an improvement over 25 hours! Thanks to DrQueue, it only took 9 hours and 36 minutes! That is quite impressive! And, it would have been even better if my Windows computer had actually had DrQueue installed. I did a calculation that had me rendering 283 frames on Windows and letting the *nix boxen take care of the rest via DrQueue, but the Windows computer finished a litter earlier than I had expected (partially due to the laptop acting up). So the system wasn’t as efficient overall as it could have been. Could it have been as short as 8 hours? I’ll tell you one thing, though, it certainly is nice being able to have it finish over 9 hours. Instead of leaving it to render over night and waking up with it still going and then still going through work, it can now be done overnight. (At least for this particular animation with its level of complexity) If I can convince some more people to donate their POS computers to me, perhaps I can have myself a mini-Pixar. q;o)

Well, today I finished up all the animation details on “Jose’s Dinner” and set it to render. I’m excited to see how long the render will take. I started it at 1438 today. However, it hasn’t been without hitch. Due, I think, to the wireless card trying to kick in, the laptop rendered for a while then suddenly couldn’t find the network anymore. That cost me about 30 minutes where the laptop wasn’t rendering - so that will skew the stats a bit. q:o(

Another wonderful comic from xkcd: